


looks familiar (feels obscene)

by alestar



Category: Prometheus (2012)
Genre: M/M, Yuletide 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-09-14 00:41:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9149038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alestar/pseuds/alestar
Summary: He sees himself facing David, the backs of his fingers resting tentatively against David's waist, his face set in grim lines.  He sees David gazing neutrally back at him, the corner of David's mouth tightened faintly as usual (maybe a manufacturing error) in that shadow of a smirk.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kaesaria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaesaria/gifts).



> 1\. kaesaria, you are an angel of Avengers fic. When your name came across the pinch-hitters desk ~~last week~~ two weeks ago, I thought, this will not do. It turns out your pinch-hitter and treat-writers did a great job! but I wanted you to have something porny anyway, even though this is not really what you asked for. I hope you had a wonderful Yuletide and have a wonderful new year. You are great.
> 
> 2\. uh, so, for this story to work you need to imagine that the crew of the Prometheus was unfrozen and en route for longer than they were in the movie-- let's say two weeks. That's long enough to develop a sexual fixation, right?

\--

 

Charlie has the dream three times before he thinks anything of it: his own unconscious body in the cryopod, and David standing nearby, impassive face staring down at him; Charlie's hard cock tenting the fabric of his uniform, his arms frozen and fixed to the armrests of the bed.  He wakes up wet with come.  Only after the fourth event does he lie awake staring at the dark ceiling of the ship afterwards.  David's reflection in the polymer of the cryopod, his hands folded in the small of his back.  What is it?

+

It isn't unheard of for humans to have sex with synthetics, but there's a stigma against it.  Factory programming has parameters-- restrictions on frequency, restrictions on force-- and that kind of takes the romance out of it.  (There are hacks to the programming and even fetishizations of program restrictions, but those are seen as lifestyle choices-- the kind of kink that is imagined to inflect everything about you.)  Exceptions are made for long periods of isolation, but that isn't something discussed in polite society.

Even so, Charlie finds himself wondering if he would do it.  Is he someone who does circumstantial robot-fucking?  

He tries to imagine approaching David, inviting him into barracks and taking him-- and it doesn't seem possible.  He sees himself facing David, the backs of his fingers resting tentatively against David's waist, his face set in grim lines.  He sees David gazing neutrally back at him, the corner of David's mouth tightened faintly as usual (maybe a manufacturing error) in that shadow of a smirk.

But the thing about Charlie is that he isn't one to ignore a question. That's what has brought him here, to the front-most edges of history. Having seized on sources in a mystery, he doesn't stay away for distance or danger or fear.  

After two or three drinks one night, he finds David during delta-shift in the briefing room; he's staring out a viewport into a field of stars.  Probably in a rest state, running diagnostics or something, some passive state with no initiative.  A blond simulacrum waiting for purpose.

Then David turns to see who's joined him, eyes lit with intelligence, taking Charlie in with that look of smug assessment, and it doesn't seem reconcilable with the vision of David as an automaton. Who would design a machine like that?  

"Hey," Charlie says.

David nods.  “Dr. Holloway.”

"How's it going?"  Charlie nods to the sky.  “Everything clear?”

David looks back at the viewport and says, “Yes, everything is clear.”  He says it softly, like a quiet joke to himself, and Charlie figures that signals the end of small talk.  "You don't get offended, right?" he says, sliding into a chair at the long briefing table.

David turns back to him.  "Nothing you will say could offend me."  

"That a challenge?" Charlie asks, mouth curling.

David returns the smile blandly.  "No, Dr. Holloway."  

They gaze at each other for a moment in silence.  

Charlie is improvising, here as in most events, following his instincts.  It is not his intent to solicit services from David, but he has the sense that he needs to talk to David and witness his own reactions.

And something else-- he wants David to know about this.  

"Can I ask you about sex?"  Charlie watches David's face shift in something strangely like surprise.  "You don't have to say yes."

"I am able to withhold disclosures from you without your permission."  The words seem a little pissy, but David's expression is mild, interested, looking down at Charlie.  He actually looks less smug than usual.  

Charlie rubs a hand over his stubbled jaw.  "I been having sex dreams about you."

David nods.  When Charlie doesn't continue, he says, "You should know that my duties on the _Prometheus_ are custodial and not recreational."

"Yeah, I'm not-- I'm just trying to figure out why."

David lifts an eyebrow.  "You're trying to identify the psychological significance of your dreams?"

That is not the whole truth, but Charlie nods.  

"May I offer my own thoughts?"

"That's why I'm here," says Charlie, though that is also not the whole truth.

David moves away from the viewport, then, to a small pantry set into the wall.  "Many humans find it difficult to work with synthetics such as myself," he says, pulling out two glasses and a carafe of filtered water.  He brings them to the table.  "They find diverse ways of dealing with that discomfort.  This seems merely to be your way of adjusting."

He sits at the briefing table across from Charlie and pours water into both glasses; he slides one over.  Neither of them is thirsty, Charlie supposes-- these are gestures that save Charlie the discomfort of having David look straight at him, as he speaks, or look pointedly away.

"These dreams of sexual intercourse allow you simultaneously to dwell on that which distinguishes me as non-human, specifically the _nature_ of my availability, and to assert bodily control over me.  Sex with me becomes both an act of identification and an act of dominance.  The outcome of the dream is a renewed sense of coherence and security."

David glances up at him as he finishes, possibly waiting for Charlie to yell, or storm out, or possibly stand up and order the synthetic to his knees.

It's the most negative vision anyone has ever posited of Charlie Holloway, and that's saying something.  He's got his share of angry exes, but this is different: a vision of something mammalian, ignorant and violent, fearful, someone striving for control over his environment at any cost.  

It casts David's half-smile in a particular light.  It casts all of Charlie's crass jokes about David 8, Space Butler, in a particular light.

"That's not what the dreams are like," Charlie says.  At the same time, his heart pounds.  That is, after all, what they say about humans who fuck synthetics; that is how he's been behaving, and it reconciles the strange, soft pulses of irritation he's felt in working with David since he woke.  What if that _is_ what Charlie Holloway is like?  It is anthropologically probable.

"May I ask what the dreams are like, in that case, Dr. Holloway?"

"You're watching me in the cryopod," Charlie says slowly, frowning.  "And I guess I get off on it."

David cocks his head.  "Are you awake?"

"No.  I mean-- at first I'm watching from somewhere else.  From outside the cryopod.  I can see my body sleeping, and you're just standing there watching him.  Me."  

"Do I touch you?"

David's expression is politely curious, his hands tucked placidly around his glass of water, but Charlie is filled suddenly with a profound sense of the activity behind his eyes-- of the strange protocols that betray it, or obscure it. That David knows and appreciates all the valences of what he says, a creature who speaks in a thousand references and riddles.  A monster of knowledge.  

"No," he says, "just watching."

"You said 'at first.'  What follows?"

"Then I guess I'm in the cryopod, but I'm still frozen.  And I'm-- hard, but I can't lift my hands or move at all."  He meets David's interested gaze.  "But I can see you outside the pod watching me."

"And then?"

Charlie's eyes fall away, and he shrugs, smiling self-consciously.  "Nothing.  I wake up.  Kinda lame for a sex dream, I know."

"Surprising you would even classify it as such."

Charlie shrugs again.  "More of the feeling, I guess," he says, scratching at his jaw.  "It gets me there, if you know what I mean."

"I believe I do, yes."  

Charlie huffs a laugh.  "Really?"

"Is there anyone else in the dream?" David asks.  Charlie shakes his head.  

"The other cryopods are full, but you're the only one who's awake."

"Not a dream of humiliation, but something to do with being witnessed in a vulnerable state."  David drinks from his water, and Charlie's eyes fix on his pale, pulsing mechanical throat.  When David pulls the glass away, there is water on his mouth.  He wipes it away with a thoughtful expression.  "Having someone see you."

"So, what?  Like a shame kink?"

"Possibly."  David smiles faintly.  "Though you don't strike me as the sort of man to be shamed by an erection.  Or by incapacity."

Charlie grins and lifts his glass.  "That's true."

"You have been discussing theism with Dr. Shaw."

Charlie stills at the non sequitur, eyebrows drawing together.  David's expression of polite inquiry hasn't changed.  The question doesn't make sense, but this is the way that David is capable beyond any other being on the ship.  Synthesizing data from a thousand sources.  A monster of computations.

"I… yes," Charlie says, although _discussing_ is the wrong word.  He and Ellie disagree fundamentally on something that can be neither proven nor disproven, so all proper discussions wore themselves out in the first few weeks of their relationship.  Now, on their way to meet their creators, it resurfaces only in snide comments.

"With your representing an atheistic position," David clarifies.

"Yeah," says Charlie.  "I want to know where humans come from.  That doesn't mean I need to believe there's a giant space guy who loves me."  

"But there's something else that god does for you," David says softly.  

Charlie raises a brow, mouth twisting.  Ellie is a genius, and a scientist, and he has heard all of her arguments.

"God provides a witness for your narrative," David continues.  "Someone who knows everything about you, from beginning to end, inside to outside, in a way that gives you a sense of your own wholeness.  The thing that humans desire foremost after mere survival."  David's head cocks, and then he is gazing at Charlie strangely, almost fondly.  "To be the object of scrutiny."

"You're saying that being on this mission has riled up old existential anxieties?"

"Only that that is a reasonable hypothesis.  An uptick in your suspicions of formlessness-- a subterranean distress over having no self-- and a corresponding uptick in your desire to consolidate that self under someone's watchful gaze."

It sounds like bullshit to Charlie, but there's no arguing with the strange shiver he feels in his core at the sight, at the sound of David's soft voice saying _watchful_.  

"Okay, so you're a god figure," Charlie says, mouth curving.  "That's way better than sex slave, huh?"

"I haven't the experience to compare."  Then David returns Charlie's smile, a sly slice in his pale face.  "That doesn't quite explain the element of frustration in your dream, though.  An eroticization of inspection coupled with paralysis."  He cocks his head.  "What is it?"

He drains the rest of his water in two swallows, then places his glass between them on the briefing table.  Charlie watches it with a feeling of finality.  

David asks, "Do you believe there are things you can't show me?"

Irrationally, in the midst of this intellectual discussion of Charlie's sex dream, Charlie's face heats.  

Without lifting his head, he watches David in his peripheral vision stand and move back to his previous station at the viewport.  He watches David's fingers move over the console beneath the viewscreen, hears the briefing room door lock.  He taps a few more lights, and the viewscreen brightens into a mirrored surface.

"Please come over here, Dr. Holloway," David says, while his hands move deftly over the console.

Charlie raises himself, heavily and quietly, from his chair and goes over to join David; David steps out of the way, and Charlie obediently positions himself in front of the mirror.  His gaze flickers briefly over himself but lands on David's reflection.  

"How far would you go," David asks, "to get your answers?  What would you be willing to do?"

Charlie's mind is a jumble of images.  

He sees himself fucking David while David fills the room with solicitous simulated moaning, face-down on the briefing room table, then David picking himself up afterward, straightening his olive green button-up with a neutral expression.  

He sees David fucking _him_ like that, pounding the existential angst right out of him, and Charlie lost in madness, panting wetly against his own forearm.  David afterwards, gently stroking Charlie's hair, hovering the way he'd hovered over Ellie when she was getting sick in the cryolab.

He sees himself kneeling at David's feet on the cold briefing room floor, filling his mouth and throat with artificial dick while David gazes down at him, noting every tic in Charlie's face, every stuttered motion of his hands.

Charlie closes his eyes, swallowing.  "Anything," he says.

"Open your eyes," David says quietly, and now he's speaking from directly behind Charlie.  Charlie obeys and meets David's gaze in their shared reflection. "What do you see?"

Charlie's eyes trace back to his own face.  "Two weirdos on the night shift."

David's mouth curves.  He nods again at their reflection.  "I see a young archaeologist on a dangerous deep-space mission."  

Charlie watches his own gaze in the mirror.   _Charles Holloway,_ he thinks, _Robot-Fucker._  

"Thrill-seeker and celebrated scholar," David continues.  "Author of several monographs on prehistoric space travel."  

Charlie glances at David's reflection then back at his own, at a loss.  David slowly reaches up from behind him and unbuttons the top three buttons of his collared shirt.  He draws out the gold chain around his neck and its tiny dew-drop pendant.  

"From my mother," Charlie says hoarsely.  

David then unbuttons the rest of the shirt and spreads the plackets wide.  He unbuttons the clasp of Charlie's slacks.  His hands are steady and warm, and the skin of Charlie's stomach flutters beneath them.  

"Would you draw yourself out, Dr. Holloway?"

They're standing close enough to the mirror that Charlie can't see anything of himself below his ribs, but he can see his arm moving, his shirt shifting, as he pulls his erection out of his slacks.  David pulls his shirt off of his shoulders; Charlie lets it slide off his arms, and David tosses it onto the table.  Charlie stands there, bare to the root of his cock except for his mother's pendant.

"If you had use of your limbs, in your dream," says David.  "Show me what you would do."

So Charlie takes his hard dick in hand and strokes it.  He can feel David's simulated body heat against his bare back.  David's warm hands push Charlie's slacks lower and tuck themselves around Charlie's hip bones, and his eyes in the mirror move curiously over Charlie's dipping shoulder, his collarbone, his stomach.  

Then David's head cocks, and his fingers spread against one hip just as Charlie is pulling upwards on his dick, and suddenly it's perfect-- a perfect situation-- like finding the sweet spot at a cave site, the place where the rock gives-- the excess rubble crumbling around it, inconsequential-- like finding the breach--

"Fuck," Charlie murmurs, and a shudder runs through his body, eyes fixed on David's face.  

He leans forward faintly to support himself with one arm on the sill of the viewport, and David follows him.  One hand leaves Charlie's hip to skim across his stomach while Charlie jacks himself.  David presses a small kiss to the back of Charlie's neck. Probably to confuse him, Charlie thinks dimly, pressing backwards with a soft gasp.  To confuse him--

"I saw you while you were sleeping," David says, voice quiet but even.  "You dreamed of ice-fishing with your uncle the winter after your father's death."  His eyes are hidden against the back of Charlie's head, but Charlie seeks out his blond hair and shadowed mouth, heart hammering.  David kisses his neck, the soft skin below his ear.  "All those people cryogenically frozen, and you were the only one who dreamed of ice."  He kisses the underside of his jaw.  "Why?"

"Fuck," Charlie says.  "Fuck, I'm gonna fuckin' come.  Oh shit."  And then he's coming in his hand, in great waves, wetting his fist and his slacks and the viewport.  "Oh fuck."

He straightens, still palming his cock, still coming, and David moves with him.  He can feel David's heavy breathing against his hair-- or whatever it is if it's not breath.  Exhaust.  David gentles him through it, as Charlie shakes, pressing more kisses into Charlie's hair.

After a long moment, when Charlie's breath has had a chance to slow, David asks, "May I ask _you_ a question now, Dr. Holloway?"

Charlie lets himself sink back against David's chest.  David's hands stay fast against his hips, and Charlie feels the hardness of David's erection pressing against him.  As, what?  A prop?  A misdirection?  Curiosity?  "Yeah," he says hoarsely, pushing back against him.

"Do you hate difference," David murmurs, nose tucked against Charlie's jaw.

"No," Charlie says, touching David for the first time, reaching behind himself to touch the shell of David's ear.  They are both looking for answers.  "I don't know," he says.

 

\--

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. title from [Inside a Dream](http://petshopboys.co.uk/lyrics/inside-a-dream) by the Pet Shop Boys.
> 
> 2\. I titled this file "darlie"-- which, I think this is currently the only David/Charlie fic on AO3, so I guess I'm allowed to name the mash-up-- but I will defer to kaesaria's judgement on this issue.


End file.
